


Talking of Michelangelo (The Come and Go Remix)

by toujours_nigel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 14:05:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for rs_remix 2011</p>
    </blockquote>





	Talking of Michelangelo (The Come and Go Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by ['Tis the Season](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/28440) by Rian219. 



> Written for rs_remix 2011

Once upon a time, in the heart of the great city of London, in a house only knowing eyes could see, a man sat in a kitchen with a candle before him, and a plate of food. The man was very tired—he wanted to go to bed, though he had done nothing all day—and the house was quiet around him, murmuring quiet lullabies to itself, and to him. He was trying to ignore it—the songs were songs of hatred, variations on the theme of “I hate you, won’t you die pretty baby who have ruined us, won’t you go to sleep and never wake?”—and was staying awake at least somewhat in order to spite it. He hated the house as much as it hated him, and was waiting to get the better of it in the end, for it to acknowledge him master and submit to his magic. He had been waiting for a long time, and it felt sometimes as though he had been waiting forever, and it bored and saddened him—he was not a very patient man. He had been waiting to grow up, as children do, and then waiting to leave his father’s house, and waiting to find love, and waiting for the war to end, and waiting to take revenge, and waiting to get out of prison, and waiting to find his godson, and waiting to be declared innocent, and waiting for the war to end, and waiting to leave his father’s house.   
  
He was thirty-six years old, Sirius Orion Black, and had been waiting for thirty years, for something or another—for chance to befall and fate to overtake him. He had been waiting, a while earlier, for the children to be smuggled from Hogwarts to him, and now, in a house quietly awash with their snores and sleeping mutterings. He was waiting for Remus Lupin, and, while waiting, he was turning magic over in his mind, in his hands. The candle burned brighter, after a while, and the doors whispered shut, and the shutters in the windows closed themselves against the possibility of snow—a crack in his cup sealed itself, and the entire house settled its wards more snugly ’round its sleepers, like a mettlesome horse that knows himself mastered.   
  
Sirius, picking at the remnants of breakfast—dinner—felt only a slight upswing in his mood, and attributed it to the presence of Harry and the anticipation of Remus. Grimmauld Place depressed him, and overwhelming the old wards was barely magic at all, simply settling the house like an old cloak around a new body. His flat in London—he had left his father’s home easily, but Wizarding London had held him in her grip—had been open and joyous and filled with more light than could possibly have flooded through its many windows; the wards had been keyed to his friends, and he had been used to coming home from St. Mungo’s to find James kipping on his couch, or Lily leafing through his books, or, once in a blue moon—five times in four years—Remus making tea in his kitchen with a carefully nonchalant smile—mostly, though, he would tromp up the stairs to find Remus sitting across from his door with his feet jammed against it, reading whatever novel he had chosen to plough through and smoking endless cigarettes. He had preferred to be let in, whether because he liked the acknowledgment, or dreaded trying the wards and finding himself locked out, Sirius had never thought to ask.  
  
He still liked being let in, and waiting for him was a pleasure, in itself, when compared to the chore of waiting for others. Sirius, who had been gregarious in youth, primarily to draw distance between his kin and himself, and had always been most comfortable when his chosen few were safe and safely guarded—‘like a dog guarding the door’, James had used to say, and Sirius had always offered up un-meant negations—had found privacy grown to an unimagined luxury after Azkaban, and had found that he was jealous of it now, and miserly with his company, hoarding it to dole out to some and to lavish it on others. Harry he could have listened to for hours, spoken to for days, Harry who was James come back, and Lily returned, and the child he’d never had to whom he had never quite been a father. Harry, and Remus, though Remus was rarely around, though Remus was late nights and early mornings and endless pleasurable waiting.  
  
Dumbledore’s wards tightened around the house and him at its centre, and the phoenix displayed prominently above the fireplace glowed gold. He dropped them one by one, felt the house stretch in relaxation in his company. It was an unnecessary bit of magic—Remus was keyed, would have found his way in with nobody waiting, would likely have even with the wards locked against him, good old Moony, always excellent at finding his way around obstructions—he needn’t have pushed himself, with his magic waning through too little use and apt to behave like nothing so much as a blocked pipe, compensating by floods for trickles. He put his head into his arms, curled over them, suddenly weary. It wouldn’t be long, not nearly long enough; already he could hear Remus coming down the stairs, trying to be quiet—only decent in a sleeping house—and then the door creaked open.  
  
“Hullo,” Remus said, still quiet, somewhere distantly amused.  
  
He looked up, felt a suppressed flinch from Remus, smiled wide and ghastly. “Hullo.”  
  
“Long night?”  
  
For a moment he couldn’t comprehend the question, it seemed so utterly puerile. “You can say that again,” he hazarded, and winced in anticipation of an equally blank rejoinder.  
  
But Remus came forward, clasped his shoulder in the honesty of bone on flesh on flesh on bone, said only, “I know.” Then he was moving forward, mug in hand, to make tea—of course he was making tea, Remus always made tea, in crises and to comfort, the serene inevitability of it deeply unnerving.  
  
Sirius, dismal at the loss of contact and horrified about the dismay, muttered “Thank you,” automatically, and sank lower in his seat, trying to huddle down.  
  
Remus took a quick, absent-minded step back, swept his hand carefully over the curve of Sirius’ skull, and stepped back to the stove, to the sink to set the dishes the children had left to cleaning themselves, to the cupboard to drag out a new cup, a bag of the tea-leaves Sirius had added to Hestia’s shopping list after Remus had started camping out at Headquarters of a night—he did not know whether Remus knew, but was sure he didn’t want him to. “Don’t mention it,” Remus said, and, measuring out the leaves in careful coffee-spoons—my life is measured in coffee-spoons—his face averted to hide some fleeting emotion, added, “Have they gone to the hospital already?”  
  
“No,” Sirius managed. “They’re asleep upstairs.” For a long, too-long, moment he wondered whether to tell Remus how it had felt, to have their voices cease, to have the house fill with an inhabited quietness, with the peace of children sleeping.  
  
“Right. Of course.” He didn’t falter, though, tapped the kettle to set the water boiling, rinsed the mugs out with a critical eye, all of it studiedly nonchalant, all of it so familiar that Sirius’ heart clenched. “Shouldn’t you be up there yourself?”  
  
"I shall,” he said, “in a little while. I simply wanted a chance to relax.” I waited for you, I wanted to let you into my house, I wanted to see you at home in this house I must make a home again. All of it too dramatic, all of it unutterable.  
  
Remus nodded, vague and non-committal, and turned to his tea again, exhaustion beginning to creep in at the edges now, in the tight creases of his mouth and the subtle tremor of his long fingers clasping the tea-pot, supporting the saucer. Sirius felt it in a tight clench around his ribs, constricting them around his heart—he should never have let Remus work, should have forced him to sit, to rest: selfish, foolish, to get caught up in a childish dream and never notice the truth before him. Typical.  
  
“He’ll be alright,” Remus said, putting his cup down. They didn’t hold too much, never had, and he could see the eggshell white of the porcelain tinted only a few shades darker by the remnants of tea. His own cup brimmed a rich brown, tendrils of steam curling into his beard.  
  
Of course Remus thought he was worrying about Arthur; he should have been. “Harry likely saved his life; I know.” He should have been, he had been, but Remus’ hands were still subtly shaking, clasped around the cup, the hounds running through his fingers.  
  
“Thank Merlin he had that dream,” Remus said.  
  
He’d been desperate, Harry, for someone to believe him, trust him, take care of him—his face in the darkness had been a scared child’s coming to his parent after a nightmare, shaking apart at the edges. “He’s not ready for this. They’re not... none of the children are.”  
  
“We weren’t.” Remus’ face had closed over a hundred fights and a hundred departures in the middle of fights—because the Order was always more important—over Sirius coming home frustrated from pureblood liaisons and Remus torn from running with the Pack. “We were too young ourselves.”  
  
Too young and too arrogant and too ready to believe the world would roll over for them like a bitch in heat. “Gods know we weren’t, nowhere near.”  
  
“We can talk about this in a while.” Remus was done, Remus was going to leave, Remus always left when conversations veered towards uncomfortable honesty. “I’ve got to head to Hogwarts, there’s a fair chance Umbridge will try her hand at sabotage somehow, and Minerva’s needed elsewhere.”  
  
Remus stood, scraped his chair back and straight-armed away from the table, cup dangling from the crook of his index finger. Sirius felt it drop, heard it shatter, was dimly aware that he was to blame, his body crushing against Remus’, shuddering it from its precarious perch, aware too that this was somewhere beyond the lines Remus had drawn between the two of them—of propriety and decency and distant affection; aware and uncaring, with the subtle weave of Remus’ shirt under his skin, the rise and fall of his stomach, the sharp indrawn breath constricting his ribs and the relieved exhale that left him yielding.  
  
“I’m not leaving you,” Remus murmured, brought his hand down to stroke over Sirius’ hair, cup the curve of his skull, stay. “Sirius, I’ll be careful, I’ll be back, I promise I’m not leaving you.”  
  
He unwound himself, slow and reluctant. “At least now they’ll all be staying for Christmas. That’s something.” The house full of blood-traitors for Christmas, lights everywhere, and carolling. How Walburga would shriek.  
  
“You’re going to sing, aren’t you?” Remus’ voice had in it a note of panic and hilarity that satisfied him entirely—good to know his regime of terror during school had had a lasting impact. “What is it to be, then? God Bless Ye Merry Hippogriffs?”  
  
“I sing exquisitely, Moony.” And, because Remus knew that as well as anyone, perhaps better, he added, “Mother debated making me join choir when I was ten.”  
  
That got a laugh—not real, by any means, but something. “Of course she did, Padfoot.” They were back to polite conversation, to being acquaintances, to ignoring everything that was awkward and unhelpful. He put both hands on Remus’ waist, careful, and pushed himself to arms’ length, standing, collecting the cups and putting them in the sink. “Go to bed, you’re dead on your feet. I’ll see you in the morning, go.”  
  
He nodded, kept washing the dishes, felt Remus make an aborted move towards him—two steps back and forward and a sudden sharp turn. The house fell silent around him, Remus climbing the stairs and closing the doors as he left. The phoenix glowed once, blinding gold, then furled its wings and faded to its usual muted orange. The portraits stirred in their sleep, and the children. Sirius put the cups away, threw out the food, put out the candle. The house lapsed into a welcoming dark.  
  
Outside, it started snowing.


End file.
